By Owen Novy | City of Rusk, Carpenter County

There are few men like Charles Wiley.

Men like him are hard to find because of both his career and when he did it.

Charles is a Vietnam veteran and a journalist. He has traveled to more countries than most can name, 120 or so.

He has been detained and tortured by state police, including the Russian KGB, and has done so while being a reputable journalist. Few have lived a life as fulfilling as Charles’s yet he has a sense of humor that juxtaposes his past experience.

Ever in search of the truth, he showed us an unseen side of the Vietnam War. It was a side hidden from our teachers and our textbooks.

He showed us a parade down Fifth Avenue in New York. This parade directly contradicts what we’ve heard from textbooks and teachers. This parade was in support of our troops overseas.

It was in fact the third-largest parade in U.S history. We had heard nothing about this parade in history class nor did it seem, according to Charles Wiley, had many Vietnam veterans.

Charles said that of the thousands of Vietnam veterans he had shown the video to the vast majority had not heard of the parade nor had they seen it. According to Charles, there were thousands of parades like this and the most recognition they received was in one sentence in an eight page Times news article.

Charles continued on by saying that the partisanship in America today is caused almost exclusively by the news media. However, he continued saying that the blame isn’t entirely on the news media. He also said that the reason why we are so partisan is because we get our news from exclusively one source.

He said the way to solve this is by watching different news organizations on occasion. He said that the media is knowingly crafting fake news. They do this, he claims, by omitting facts that could in any way question their viewpoint.
Further, he proposed that there are two kinds of journalist. An objective journalist is what we all imagine a journalist to be, factual and non-partisan.

An advocate journalist is the kind that appears to be far more common today according to him. Advocate journalists are journalists who are identical to objective journalists except for a certain subset of issues.

These, he said, are why America has the degree of dispute that we face in America. Charles and his ideas are a rare commodity in America today and encourages everyone to attend one of his presentations.